Different Fountains
[…] Hieroglyphic Being aka Jamal Moss aka IAMTHATIAM aka The Sun God is inspired with Afrofuturism. He has a lot in common with Sun Ra. Even if it was only for the part that they were both inspired by the book of Urantia. This book presents a detailed description of the cosmos and the place/relationship of humans within and can be read as some sort of alternative bible.
It was also the inspiration for Stockhausens seven operas cycle ‘Licht’.
Hieroglyphic Being hears music as a unified force, beyond races or genres. coming out of the Chicago underground music scene he wants to bring the Chicago house back to it’s origins. His urban electronic experience has a DIY-attitude that gives voice to the DNA of music that’s part of a sacred geometry.From an early age he had a feeling of disconnection which he escaped by diving into science fiction, free jazz, new age and other cosmical stuff. Although the technology he uses is more advanced he’s music is sonically a relative of earlier jazz.
Included in this post you can find a small mix that i made with parts of ‘Le Jardin des Chemins Bifurquants’ from Hieroglyphic Being. Included are snippets from ‘Free your mind and your ass will follow’ from Funkadelic, ‘Rain dance’ from Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi outfit and ‘Media Dreams’ from Sun Ra.
Oh… and the ‘Spaced-Out-Discofied-Boogieman’ on the picture is a member of the Seventies Motown band Undisputed Truth!
Have i said something about Afrofuturism?www.differentfountains.com/blog/2011/12/04/hieroglyphic-beings/

The Wire
Before it became a mere synonym for background or wallpaper music, the word Ambient signified music that floated without roots yet wasn’t rootless. It encompassed beats, drifting melody, textural experiments, field recordings, samples and much more, gaining its power from contradictory impulses. Over two decades of production work, Jamal Moss has made Ambient music in this sense. He’s ostensibly a House music producer but his influences run deep, from classic Industrial and Sun Ra to New Age mysticism and occult knowledge. Even his most beat-driven, dancefloor-ready productions slip the shackles of four-onthe-floor and hackneyed melody. The two side-long pieces on this album forgo overt drum patterns altogether, but the rest of Moss’s hallmarks are all in place: the distorted bass thump, hazy chords and layers of bleeping, rhythmic earworms all cobbled into a crude sense of form, one that’s more about decentred pulse than logical development or easy peaks and comedowns.
And it’s this lack of a centre that makes Moss’s music so striking. “Rhythmes Circadiens” never settles on a single path, as short chirping sequences flutter around dark, ominous chords and robotic thrusts. The listener is left to imagine the rhythmic tissue that connects these disparate elements. The B side, “The Garden Of Forking Paths”, pushes the contrast so far that the piece comes to occupy parallel worlds. A crunching, distorted riff – played on a keyboard but sounding lifted from a Metal record – threatens to engulf a taut helix of pinpoint synthesizer tones. The two streams occasionally approach each other and merge in a violent, messy synthesis, only to recede again, transformed. It’s in these moments of cyclic friction that Moss’s music feels truly exploratory, flux the only constant. – Matt Wuethrich, The Wire, December 2011

Foxy Digitalis
In a year of seemingly endless genre micro-variation and proliferation Hieroglyphic Being has still managed to produce an record of rough-hewn electronics that eludes any easy labelling, not only completely inverting his own sound, but everyone else’s. Two sides of vinyl, two tracks of otherworldly psychedelic electronic music. Gone is the four to the floor rhythmic grid, leaving the synthesizer grumbles and chattering vocal samples freed from drum machine bondage to float away, knocked out of orbit with the lo-fi percussion and sudden tempo shifts.
Conceptually, Jamal R. Moss claims the record deals with the possibilities of a form of worship unique to plant life and how this horticultural theology could take shape. Although the only real hint of this arises from the gorgeous artwork provided by Hair Police’s Robert Beatty, at times the combinations of sounds on display do indeed rival such an unfathomable and charmingly absurd concept.
Rhythmes Circadiens’ heavily syncopated synthesizer tones are reminiscent of early, concise Autechre but elongated and warped into bizarre new configurations. The extended ambient passage opening the piece (all soft textures and pads) quickly develops into a string of irregular percussive melodies locked into shifting poly-rhythms that at their most lucid sound akin to Zomby’s off-kilter beats, pushed even further from any linear form.
The Garden of Forking Paths is even stranger and more free-form than its predecessor, relying initially on drone aesthetics, masses of cycling oscillator tones, spooling, gibbering vocal snippets and queasy computer samples only for the momentum to build enough for a submerged industrial techno to kick in beneath the Casio squelches. A thrilling and bewildering twenty minutes of electronic music that sounds great with the bass up too.
Every moment of the record feels focused on spewing out ideas and striking sounds, both serious and playful. It is organized and regimented like its ‘house’ precedents, but covered in whimsical, improvisatory flourishes, bass-lines and strangled tones reaching the surface only to subside and never return. A fantastic, unexpected and provocative little glimpse of Hieroglyphic Being’s parallel world of alien dance music. – January 4, 2012 By Chris Trowell, Foxy Digitalis

Dumpster Diving Blog
Absolutely the best album I've heard this year as of today. Innocent and thoughtful composition is mixed with surrealistic hints of improvised synth stuff masterfully. Actually I even can see the real story behind this music. The author tells it with affection and passion. Objects and characters appear and disappear fast but in a precise order. Punk dancers fall on the IDM dance floor and are forced to dance minimal synth dances. I can not describe it better. I am totally in love with this release. – Dumpster Diving Blog, March 2012

Norman Records
‘Le Jardin des Chemins Bifurquants’ is the debut outing on Audiomer for Chicago based DJ and producer Hieroglyphic Being a.k.a DJ Jamal Moss. Now, I wouldn’t have guessed from listening to this mind-boggling release that Jamal is a student of House music educated by the likes of Adonis and Steve Pointdexter as ‘Le Jardin des Chemins Bifurquants’ is a bizarre futurised mish-mash of psychedelic electronics, New Age and Free-Jazz influences with only the barest hint of the conventions of House. Not unlike Sun Ra, Jamal’s work is complex and otherworldly with an emphasis on experimentation. This makes for not the easiest of listens but is ultimately rewarding if you give it the time, especially as the layers begin to thicken. ‘Rhythmes Circadiens’ is a skitterish little composition that sees various taps and warbles fight it out against bass heavy drones and obscure synth tones. Flip it and ‘The Garden Of Forking Paths’ begins in a buzzsaw, drone heavy style before introducing more familiar themes like bristling arpeggio’s and strong synth melodies. It’s hard to classify this album as anything other than Sound Art before this turning point when it verges into something nearing traditional sci-fi soundtrack music. Two other interesting points - Jamal uses mental keyboards on this including the Korg DW8000 and the Casio RZ-1 and the artwork is by Hair Police dude Robert Beatty who progs up the sleeve a treat.